Haarvöl * Preliminary Saturation * Ilia Belorukov

Driven by Passion and Perseverance, Sietse van Erve has turned his Moving Furniture Recordslabel into one of the most important experimental electronic music labels in Holland. A minimalist drone artist himself (his own music is released as Orphax), inspired by artists like Eliane Radigue, many of the releases on MFR are minimalist drone music. But not all of them are ‘minimal’, as demonstrated recently by the two label overview mixes he created for Gonzo (Circus) magazine, one called Maximaaland the other Minimaal.

But before you dive into the label’s back catalogue, check out these recent MFR batch of recent releases:

Haarvöl is a collective project from Portugal with three core members: Fernando José Pereira, João Faria and Rui Manuel Vieira. This time they’re collaborating with Bertrand Chavarria-Aldrete playing sirincho (a mexican string instrument) and 12 string guitar on the closing track Brumal.

Peripherad Debrisis the second part of a trilogy: the first part was Bombinate, released a year ago.
While Bombinate focused on ‘low, vibrating, humming sounds’, the second part of the trilogy moves towards the periphery, ‘where the turbulence is bigger and more decisive, precisely because it is far from the center, it is also in these remains that are the most stimulating sonorities to be explored. […] Perhaps there, far from the center, the experiments are more free and possible.’As a result, the music ranges from (again in their own words): ‘quasi-ambient stillness to a mass sound quasi-noise.’ Exploring the periphery is a fascinating sonic adventure!
The track titles does reflect Haarvöl‘s explorations – but there’s one especially intriguing title: ‘Folding Simple Minded Into A Tiny Cube.’ I have pondered about this while listening but I still haven’t figured out what that could possibly mean…

For many serious sound artists it is (or should be) a natural starting point to create their own sound sources. Never use your synth presets or just copy samples from a commercial collection – leave that to new age artists. An important part of the creative process lies in the creation of the basic sound material with which the complete work is created.

Preliminary Saturation (Steffan de Turck,a.k.a. Staplerfahrer, and Wouter Jaspers) are now breaking this unwritten rule with this album: their sound material is taken from a 2004 release by Jos Smolders: ‘Textures and Mobiles’, which was created with a limited set of sounds: ‘dtmf and ccitt tones that were generated by telephones and pure sine waves that interfere with each other.’The duo was very impressed with this release, and used samples of it years later for a live performance on Smolders’ birthday party. And now they use the same sources again to recycle and remix it (‘adding some of their own spices’) into this album. The original sound creator clearly approves of this, since he mastered You Are The Universehimself

I don’t know the original album, so I cannot compare these three tracks to their original sound sources and what Smolders did with it. But De Turck and Jaspers handle the original samples with all due respect, as if they were their own, and use the original material to create three long tracks (ranging from 10 to 16 minutes) opening up an amazing sonic world. A world opening up new possibilities with almost incomprehensible technology. It makes you feel like the couple on the cover, staring at the then futuristic looking computer setup.

Perhaps the most minimal release of this set comes from Ilia Belorukov, from St. Petersburg. Nobody Ever Escaped From There is the latest in his impressive discography, following up There Was Hardly Anybody There in 2016 (not counting the many collaboration releases, such as The Red Soul with René Aquarius and Rutger Zuydervelt earlier this year).Belorukov is an improvising artist often playing saxophone, but for this release he uses the Variophoneas developed by Evgeniy Sholpo in 1932.

It’s interesting to read some more information about the Variophoneto understand its strange wobbly sound:

“The variophone is a photo-electrical instrument for which you works by means of rotating cut-out discs which are recorded on film as sound. Due to the instability of this instrument the sound has a very natural sound to it, as well as a rich sound colour palette.”From these liner notes description I could not really imagine how this instrument works and sounds, so it may help to check this link to read some more about this instrument.

Belorukovdoes not use the Variophone as a solo instrument but adds field recordings and sounds of other devices. The result is a post-industrial soundscape ‘with a focus on the lower frequency spectrum’.

With titles like But Nobody Would Come, One Never Meets Anybody the atmosphere is as bleak and grey as the cover image. The dystopic landscape definitely gets under your skin – especially when played on a relatively low volume because the sounds merge with that of your own environment but drastically change the atmosphere. You tend to forget that there’s music playing but are still feeling that something’s not the same. And isn’t that about the purest definition of ‘ambient music’?

Frans de Waard * Zeno van den Broek * Kassel Jaeger * Orphax Reframed

Perhaps, it’s a bit weird to talk about an album with a title like this, which was indeed released in August last year, in the middle of the winter season. But however, the music is a pleasure to listen to all year round, and especially in the cold of winter we long for the long and warm days of summer.

Frans de Waard is a Dutch pioneer who has been active in all kinds of experimental electronic music since 1984. Not only as a musician, but also as a label owner and reviewer for Vital Weekly, covering about every thinkable aspect of experimental music.

Hot August Night, released on Chihei Hatakeyama’s White Paddy Mountain label, was created in a sad period when his mother was terminally ill. It is basically an improvisation (or ‘tinkering’) on an iPad piano app, later transformed to this 45 minute piece of lo-fi ambient.“It is not a work of sadness for me, but a celebration of both my wonderful parents and their support for my music over the years, even though they not always understood what it was about.”

The piece feels generative in nature, it could have been one of Brian Eno’s compositions, albeit that Frans de Waard‘s choices of sounds are less ’round’ than Eno’s, with considerable more distortion by design. Hot August Night is ambient in the classic definition of ‘music that is as ignorable as it is interesting’. It is interesting to listen to the different elements slowly shifting in and out of focus, subtly changing the sound image while retaining the peaceful mood.

I don’t know if it’s the title or my association with summer, but there’s one sound element that reminds me of the cowbells worn by cattle in the Alp fields of Austria and Switzerland.
So if anyone ever thought that Ambient music ‘needs more cowbell‘ – try this one!

Zeno van den Broek is a Dutch composer/multi-media artist that recently moved to Copenhagen. He “utilizes immaterial and temporal means such as sound, acoustics and projections to create site
and concept specific works. He has developed a distinctive language based on pure sound sources, often sine waves and noise, in relation to minimal visual aesthetics based on lines and grids. With these means he creates site-specific patterns of interference, which fully express the characteristics of the space.”

Paranon is released by the Moving Furniture Records label, but it would’ve fitted perfectly on the Raster-Noton label too, for its almost academical, analytical conceptual approach.“Paranon consists of two compositions based on parameter canons of sine wave generators. […] The custom programmed sine wave generators Zeno van den Broek uses on Paranon make it possible to generate interference, shift phases and alternate frequencies with great precision.”

This sounds like there’s a pretty complicated algorithm behind the two twenty-minute Canons of Paranon. But it is not a complicated work to listen to (if you’re familiar with minimalist drone music, that is. Though ‘minimal’ may be a badly chosen word for this work).
The deep drones fill the atmosphere and you can sense the interplay of the sound waves interfering with each other – which will sound different depending on the reflections of the environment it is played in. In a way, listening on headphones is the ‘purest’ way to listen to these works, and they sound absorbing this way. But then you’re eliminating the characteristics of the space it is played in, and thus you bypass one of the key elements that Zeno van den Broek investigates: space, time and physics.

Retroactions by Kassell Jaeger is the very first release on Moving Furniture‘s sublabel Eliane Tapes. The label is dedicated to (and inspired by) the work of Éliane Radigue, a true pioneer in the field of minimalism and drone music. If you’re familiar with her work, you’ll know what to expect from this newborn label: fascinating explorations in extreme minimalism

Kassell Jaeger presents four ‘studies’, each around 20 minutes, experimenting with different feedback setups, using 6 microphones and 10 speakers. There are two pieces (Controlled Aerial Feedbacks and Non-controlled Aerial Feedbacks), each with their own Processed version. No information is provided about the way the feedback signal is controlled.
The result is 80 minutes of deep drones perfect for ‘Deep Listening”. Like good drones should, these sounds seem to make a connection between the listener and the unknown earthly (perhaps even cosmic) frequencies. Immersive and timeless.

In line with the media used in the 60’s and 70’s, Eliane Tapes editions will be released on (limited edition of 100) cassettes. But for playback I recommend the hi-res digital files because they don’t have the characteristic hiss and distortion that cassette tapes inevitably have.

As Orphax, Sietse van Erve is constantly looking for the perfect drone. He is a huge fan of the work of Éliane Radigue (read above about his new label Eliane Tapes), which resounds in his work. With his Dream Sequence series (currently four editions) he presents ‘experimental ambient/drone pieces with a dreamy touch.’

For this release, the Dream Sequences material was reworked and ‘reframed’ by Haarvöl, Jos Smolders and Rutger ‘Machinefabriek’ Zuydervelt. It is interesting to hear what other artists can do with sound material as basic as a drone. Of course, the artists invited are no strangers to the genre and each have an impressive body of work themselves. They’re all soul mates in this musical respect. The result 60 minutes of experimental electronic drone music in three tracks that fit together as a hand in a glove.

Haarvöl includes an explanation of their intention with this piece: ‘We wanted to make a theme in which the dream idea would somehow accommodate our aesthetics.’ This includes field recordings from a nanotechnology laboratory as well as a modified bagpipe (!). (Haarvöl are Portuguese; the bagpipe is a popular instrument in the northern region of Miranda do Douro).“Our dream is embodied in a naturally surreal but also mechanical sequence; in dystopia seeking return to its original utopian condition at any moment: to the dream.”

Jos Smolders and Machinefabriek did not include any notes about their rework, because they wanted to let the music speak for itself. However, Smolders’ intention is given in the title: “Functional Neuratanomy Of Human Rapid Eye Movement Sleep And Dreaming.”I guess this marks the start of yet another great series.